What Can Law Students And Young Lawyers Learn From The Great Elon Musk?

Entrepreneur Elon Musk went from being broke to a billionaire. Columnist Renwei Chung looks at what we can learn from Musk about failure.

“All I have in life is my new appetite for failure / And I got a hunger pain that grows insane / Tell me do that sound familiar?” Kendrick Lamar

In 2007, Tesla was in a near-fatal situation. In 2008, Elon Musk, Tesla’s cofounder, filed for divorce from his wife Justine. By June 2010, the New York Times declared Musk broke.

In July 2010, Musk had paid nearly $4 million, or an average of roughly $170,000 per month for 24 months, in legal and accounting fees. Musk stated, “What caught me by surprise, and forced me to seek emergency loans from friends, were the enormous legal fees I had to pay my ex-wife’s divorce lawyers.” By his own account, Musk needed an extension by the court to pay his legal bills.

Musk may have been cash-poor, but he certainly wasn’t broke. Even back then, Musk had a million-dollar mentality and billion-dollar ideas. So what can we as law students and young lawyers learn from the great Elon Musk?

Recently, on the popular question-and-answer website Quora, someone asked, “How can I be as great as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, [and] Richard Branson?” Surprisingly, the most popular response to this inquiry was submitted by the ex-wife of one of these famous entrepreneurs. Justine Musk, a successful novelist and blogger in her own right, responded:

[Y]ou don’t have to be Richard or Elon to be affluent and accomplished and maintain a great lifestyle. Your odds of happiness are better that way. But if you’re extreme, you must be what you are, which means that happiness is more or less beside the point. These people tend to be freaks and misfits who were forced to experience the world in an unusually challenging way. They developed strategies to survive, and as they grow older they find ways to apply these strategies to other things, and create for themselves a distinct and powerful advantage. They don’t think the way other people think.

Highlights of her advice included:

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  1. “Be obsessed. If you’re not obsessed, then stop what you’re doing and find whatever does obsess you.”
  2. “You must be in service to something bigger if you are to inspire the people you need to help you (and make no mistake, you will need them).”
  3. “Extreme people combine brilliance and talent with an *insane* work ethic, so if the work itself doesn’t drive you, you will burn out or fall by the wayside or your extreme competitors will crush you and make you cry.”
  4. “It helps to have superhuman energy and stamina. If you are not blessed with godlike genetics, then make it a point to get into the best shape possible.”
  5. “Learn to handle a level of stress that would break most people.”
  6. “[Extremely successful people] do not fear failure – or they do, but they move ahead anyway. They will experience heroic, spectacular, humiliating, very public failure but find a way to reframe until it isn’t failure at all.”
  7. “When they fail in ways that other people won’t, they learn things that other people don’t and never will. They have incredible grit and resilience.”

I suppose the ultimate lessons we could learn from Elon and Justine Musk are that failure is not fatal and relationships are not guaranteed. If you want something bad enough, then you need to fight for it. At the end of the day, I hope you can say that the juice was worth the squeeze.

Lastly, if you can’t avoid divorce, you should at least attempt to limit the enormous legal fees prompted by these ultimate disagreements. In other words, don’t let other lawyers become rich on your behalf. If anybody should be aware and weary of legal fees, it should be us.


Renwei Chung is the Diversity Columnist at Above the Law. You can contact Renwei by email at projectrenwei@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn

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